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After the War, Before the War

February 1922: A parcel delivery run in a vanished England.Credit
Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

“It is a fact so familiar that we seldom remember how very strange it is,” the historian George N. Clark wrote in 1932, “that the commonest phrases we hear used about civilization at the present time all relate to the possibility, or even the prospect, of its being destroyed.” In “The Twilight Years,” his thought-­provoking and illuminating new study of the interwar period, Richard Overy contends that before 1914 the British believed they had conquered the world and would rule it forever. After World War I, a wrecked generation had to pick up the pieces of that world and ask what went wrong. It is this process that occupies the book, which successfully adopts a broad-brush approach to cultural life without obscuring gemlike details. During the 1920s and ’30s, Britain saw itself as a civilization in crisis, facing the ominous dawn of a new Dark Age.

If this feels familiar, Overy is not surprised. “For some years now,” he writes, “there has existed a popular belief that the Western world faces a profound crisis.” A professor of modern history at the University of Exeter, Overy argues rather sternly that, in fact, the West today enjoys a far more secure and wealthier way of life than at any point in history. By contrast, during the interwar years the British — then occupying a position approximately analogous to modern Americans in terms of global influence and responsibility — had indisputable cause for fear. Nearly a million British subjects were killed during World War I, and soon afterward fissures began to show in the empire. At the beginning of the ’30s, the world faced a serious financial downturn, and the rise of new and deadly forms of political extremism. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Britain, France and Spain were, as Overy points out, the only major democracies left in Europe.

Skeptic though he may be about equating interwar Britain with the modern United States, Overy is clearly tickled by the parallels. He is too sophisticated a historian to belabor them, but from a chapter entitled “The Death of Capitalism” to his account of the self-proclaimed agents of morality attempting to “cure” homosexuality, there is plenty here that strikes a chord. On that supposed cure, the editor of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet was convinced that proper treatment could turn any homosexual into “quite a cheerful citizen” — though it is hard to imagine many of the unfortunate subjects being cheered up by the combination of vigorous exercise and cold baths he prescribed.

The economy of the early 1930s was, as John Maynard Keynes put it, in “a frightful muddle,” and capitalism itself was increasingly seen to be riddled with flaws. Debate raged about whether it should be reformed or junked. “The signposts of economic and social evolution point inevitably from capitalism to socialism and communism,” the young economist Maurice Dobb wrote. He became a prominent intellectual, accepting a position at Trinity College, Cambridge: as Overy acidly notes, “the college tolerated his Marxism and he, evidently, tolerated its opulence.”

Dobb was unusual. Though a more moderate socialism did come to hold political sway in Britain, the nation consistently rejected the extremist politics that swamped the rest of Europe. Even at the outbreak of World War II, Communist and fascist parties counted their combined memberships at around 40,000 — less than one percent of the population — and few of those were active. In 1933, Wyndham Lewis’s sympathetic biography of the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was displayed in a famous bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road. Twice a day, the window had to be hosed down to remove all the accumulated spittle.

While British politics remained resolutely mainstream, science flirted with the fringes. Social hygienists recommended that girls eat cakes and porridge to avoid sexually awakening themselves. Psychoanalysts applied their theories to “the insanity of nations.” Eugenicists claimed that a “defective” generation was being bred, arguing that criminality as well as physical and mental characteristics were inherited via “germ plasm.” Those classed as defective could include vagrants, inebriates, drug addicts, prostitutes, perverts, imbeciles, deaf-mutes, the blind, the insane and epileptics — totaling, in one estimate, 9.5 million people, almost one-quarter of Britain’s population. The birth control pioneer and eugenicist Marie Stopes, concerned with the decline in what she called the “imperial race,” disowned her own son because he married a woman who wore spectacles.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 pitted the democratic republic against nationalist authoritarians. The conflict made a profound impact on Britain — one which, as Overy rightly says, has often been underrated. His chapter on it is one of the most affecting sections of the book, telling of how 4,000 Britons — scientists, philosophers, poets and manual workers alike — volunteered to fight Fascism in a country to which they had no connection, simply because they believed it to be a just cause. George Orwell was among those who went, hand grenades dangling from his belt, accompanied by a small dog with the initials of the Marxist party to which he belonged painted on its side. Orwell, Overy says in the course of a particularly winning description, was “so fastidious about completing his toilet each day that if there was no water to shave in, he would shave in wine.” That certainly brings a whole new dimension to Champagne socialism. Orwell was wounded in action, shot through the neck by a nationalist sniper. He was lucky to survive. Many did not.

Such had been the horrors of World War I that pacifism, and the avoidance of war by any means, was a dominant theme of the interwar years. The Spanish Civil War and the enormities of the Nazi regime in Germany changed that. “I hate war with as much venom as you do,” the novelist Storm Jameson wrote to her pacifist colleague Vera Brittain, “but I have come to believe that there are certain values for which it may be necessary to fight.” When the crisis of civilization really did arrive in the shape of World War II, there was no choice about how to deal with it. Britain fought for its liberty and its life.

“The Twilight Years” was published in England as “The Morbid Age.” Overy notes that Leonard Woolf was obliged to retitle some of his books for American publication: “Barbarians at the Gate” became “Barbarians Within and Without,” and after some debate “Quack Quack,” his critique of capitalism, became “Quack-Quack,” with a hyphen. These may be trifling, but Overy’s British title is more memorable and more appropriate to the content than the American one. It is hard to see why a publisher would prefer “The Twilight Years” — unless putting the word “Twilight” on the cover is enough to persuade Stephenie Meyer’s audience of teenage vampire fans to buy scholarly British cultural history.

Whatever it may be called, Overy’s study of British culture between the wars is absorbing and unexpectedly moving. Some of its stories may haunt the reader long after the book has been closed, and not just the morbid ones. This reviewer has been unable to forget the June 1939 survey sent out to all medical personnel of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, asking them to state preferences for their wartime service — whether they would rather do hospital work, emergency work, work with children or work with adults. Ernest Jones, the 60-year-old doyen of British psychoanalysis, sent back his form with a simple declaration scrawled at the bottom: “Ready for anything. E. J.” Perhaps that is a clue to why, despite the all-pervading sense of crisis, Britain survived its twilight years — and the catastrophic war that followed.

THE TWILIGHT YEARS

The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars

By Richard Overy

Illustrated. 522 pp. Viking. $35

Alex von Tunzelmann’s latest book is “Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire.”

A version of this review appears in print on December 20, 2009, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: After the War, Before the War. Today's Paper|Subscribe